Promoting Students’ Critical Thinking in Writing Persuasive Text through Explicit Direct Instruction (Edi)

Critical thinking is regarded as a critical issue to solve. Students should be equipped by critical thinking due to its pivotal position in developing students’ language competence. However, this issue remains unsolved for many obstacles occurring at classroom learning. Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) is claimed as one of the methods contributing to successful critical thinking development. The present research aimed at portraying how EDI directed students to enhance their critical thinking and EDI implementation in writing persuasive essay. The present research employed qualitative approach with case study method. The subjects involved in this research were 20 of 3rdyear students of a private college in East Jakarta. The instruments used to collect the data were observation, interview, and document analysis. The findings of the research indicated that: 1) EDI assisted the students with the promotion of their critical thinking in the argument analysis by the reinforcement provided by re-teaching and CFU with T-APPLE concept, and 2) EDI was implemented based on the seven components of its lesson design and in conjunction with a variety of learning strategies. To these extents, EDI implementation in writing class has specifically enlighten one of critical writing dimensions. Research on EDI effectiveness quantitatively is adjured.


Abstract
Critical thinking is regarded as a critical issue to solve. Students should be equipped by critical thinking due to its pivotal position in developing students' language competence. However, this issue remains unsolved for many obstacles occurring at classroom learning. Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) is claimed as one of the methods contributing to successful critical thinking development. The present research aimed at portraying how EDI directed students to enhance their critical thinking and EDI implementation in writing persuasive essay. The present research employed qualitative approach with case study method. The subjects involved in this research were 20 of 3 rdyear students of a private college in East Jakarta. The instruments used to collect the data were observation, interview, and document analysis. The findings of the research indicated that: 1) EDI assisted the students with the promotion of their critical thinking in the argument analysis by the reinforcement provided by re-teaching and CFU with T-APPLE concept, and 2) EDI was implemented based on the seven components of its lesson design and in conjunction with a variety of learning strategies. To these extents, EDI implementation in writing class has specifically enlighten one of critical writing dimensions. Research on EDI effectiveness quantitatively is adjured.

INTRODUCTION
Developing critical thinking is pivotal to meet the demands of much more complicated situation in the world. To Lombardi, Kowitt, and Stapless (2014)critical thinking is required for the success of two things, college and careers. In college, such a skill is needed as a basic competence ought to be possessed by graduates (Diamond, 1997, as cited in Halpern, 2003. Karakoc (2016), seeing how the world and generation are growing, corroborates that the skill of critical thinking is a crucial element for modern education approaches and models. Wagner (2008) further adds this skill as one of the seven survival skills to conquer the world, especially in the 21 st century (Lamb, Maire, & Doecke, 2017). In succeeding careers, critical thinking has a close relation to decision making in workplace as reported by Noel, Pierre and Watson (2017). In details, they mention that critical thinking encompasses leaders to examine decisions to make, allows individual to analyze data from any possible points of view, in order to discover the best choice that most benefits the organization.
Further talk about critical thinking in schooling is its importance on promoting students' writing skill. By developing student critical thinking in writing, it is expected that the ability to analyse, think critically and solve problems are able to be encouraged (Liu, 2018). More detail, Wilson (Wilson, 2016) quantitatively and qualitatively reported how important critical thinking is for students to nurture their writing skills. In Asian context, Nguyen (2016), focusing the research on simple and basic writing, proposed that critical thinking enhances student basic writing performances. Continuous practice on writing with critical thinking is mandatory for the sake of academic writing success (Mehta, 2014).
However, encompassing students' critical thinking in writing remains a big problem for both teachers and lecturers. Most problems revolve in their writing class are due to mechanics comprising of finding, organizing, and analysing ideas.
Occasionally, they happen to possess vast ideas but have not experienced yet how to jot down the ideas. Different ability on achievement becomes another main reason of writing class successful learning outcome.
Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) is a method introduced to handle such problems. This model of teaching is conceived as one of the best practical solutions to foster students' critical thinking as the development of direct instruction (DI) or explicit instruction (EI). Most published research discuss DI or EI significance towards writing, some other concern on critical thinking and some other pertain to both writing and critical thinking. Marzuki (2016)has researched how DI might develop students' writing skill in composing papers resulting in representative papers. López, Torrance, Rijlaarsdam and Fidalgo (2017)proved that DI is effective in improving students' writing skills. The recent research was conducted by El and See (2019) practically showing that explicit teaching or instruction (EI) is promising for students' critical thinking development. Beforehand, another research focusing on writing performance conducted by Chuah, Choo, Kaur and Singh (2011) reported that EI is proved to assist students with the writing development in its relation with critical literacy. Zhao, Pandian and Singh (2016) further reported that DI assisted students in promoting their critical thinking and it was applicable to EFL classrooms.
The research highlighted above mostly talk about DI or EI in its assistance with writing and critical thinking but did not portray the detail process of how DI or EI was implemented to enhance critical thinking. In respect to EDI, the fact that it has not been implemented yet in many fields of teaching including English writing class is a bit regrettable with respect to its benevolence to student critical thinking cultivation. Therefore, a comprehensive research on how EDI implementation as an effort to student critical thinking promotion is an urge to conduct.
Seeing the above explanation, the present research sharpened the foci on: (1) how EDI enhances students' critical thinking in writing persuasive essay and, (2) how EDI is implemented in classroom session.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Critical thinking, seeing its importance, is a critical part of education needed to deliver to students. To Halpern (2003: 6), it is the use of cognitive skills or strategies that increase the probability of a desirable outcome. It is used to describe thinking that is purposeful, reasoned, and goal directed-the kind of thinking involved in solving problems, formulating inferences, calculating likelihoods, and making decisions, when the thinker is using skills that are thoughtful and effective for the particular context and type of thinking task. While Cottrell (2005: 1) sees critical thinking as cognitive activity associated with using the mind. She further argues that critical thinking uses mental processes such as the involvement of attention, categorization, selection and judgments. These two definitions infer that critical thinking is closely related to cognitive skills and activity to enhance students' skills to solve problems by the process of selecting, analyzing, judging and making decision. Beforehand, Halpern (2003) has highlighted the dimensions of critical thinking which become the parameter for a critical thinker to perform the skills and attitudes.

Decision making and problem solving
Halpern tends to say that decision making and problem solving are the main concerns of people regarding critical thinking. These two skills are commonly utilized in figuring out quantitative problems' answers.

Thinking as hypothesis testing
Halpern admits that thinking as hypothesis testing is very much like scientific method involving the process of explaining, predicting, and controlling. She mentions that the skills used in thinking as hypothesis testing are the same ones that are used in scientific reasoning--the accumulation of observations, formulation of beliefs or hypotheses, and then using the information collected to decide if it confirms or disconfirms the hypotheses.

Argument analysis
Halpern tends to say that argument is a set of statements with at least one conclusion and one reason that supports the conclusion. In reality, to state an argument, a reason and a conclusion to complete it are needed. Skill to provide a reason as well as a conclusion to support an argument, to Halpern, should be empowered in college.

Likelihood and uncertainty
Same as argument analysis, likelihood and uncertainty should also be enhanced particularly in college level. Halpern acknowledges that students need to be able to determine the right probability and likelihood as they influence the decision making.

Verbal reasoning
This dimension has something to do with how to persuade people in a daily language use. Halpern mentions that verbal reasoning has something to do with reciprocal relationship between language and thought of an individual.
Someone's thought is mentioned to determine the language use.
Halpern affirms that critical thinking can be amended by explicit learning.
This model of learning was first introduced by Engelmann and Becker (1964) in Ybarra (2014). This method develops time to time and finally in 2009, a new term called as Explicit Direct Instruction (EDI) has been officially introduced by Hollingsworth and Ybarra (2009). EDI has been affirmed by Hollingsworth and Ybarra (Hollingsworth, Ybarra, 2009)to be able to direct pupils to be able to learn, and assists teachers with effective lessons delivery which leads to students better achievement and performance, emphasizing in low and high achievers, including those who learn English and students with special needs as well. Accomplishing the best achievement, EDI applies the following four components: 1) checking for understanding (CFU); 2) setting lesson objectives; 3) activating prior knowledge; and 4) developing students' skills by explaining, modeling, and demonstrating; presenting content; and using guided practice.
The above components are then elaborated into EDI lesson design detailed below.

1) Learning objective
Learning objectives are written in terms of a situation and a behavior objective. To state them means that teacher is ready to send students to be successfully learning independently. Teacher needs to deliver them in an understandable way to students.
2) Activate prior knowledge Activating students' prior knowledge is applied by reviewing students' prior knowledge and experience and relating them to a new concept.

3) Concept development
Teacher explains with a concept: what it is and why it is important. In what step, teacher introduces a new concept and idea. Why talks about the importance of the concept.

4) Skill development
Teacher describes a concept of how it is done. Students are enlightened with the steps of concept application; here procedural and declarative knowledge (organizational strategy to accomplish the concept goal) should be clearly conveyed.

5) Guided practice
Students are firstly guided to practice -how it is done‖ based on the problems given by working together with teachers around. Afterwards, students are slowly released to independently work by themselves. Teacher has freedom to practice any possible directions and strategies to lead students working on tasks.

6) Relevance
In this part, teacher is no longer teaching. Students almost completely work on their own to reach the learning objectives. Beforehand, teacher must ensure that all students know how to do the task successfully.

7) Closure
Students show and share their works with teacher. Teacher then gives confirmation whether or not their works are right. Feedbacks on students' works are given and students' difficulties that need assistance during class are identified.
Practically, lessons in EDI are not scripted (Hollingsworth & Ybarra, 2009). This further infers that the teaching practice conducted is flexible; one strategy of learning might be implemented in conjunction with another strategy to ensure students' mastery. Not to forget, T-APPLE (Teach First, Ask a question, Pause, Pair-Share, Pick a non-Volunteer, Listen to the Response, Effective Feedback) should always be remembered and applied. Ensuring that all components are broken down completely, Hollingsworth and Ybarra have provided a template used to plan EDI lessons which are summarized in a simpler way below.

Research Design
The present research employed qualitative approach with a case study method.
The method was chosen for it allows to see how the process of theoretical model in its practical implementation (Creswell, 2014). Additionally, case study was chosen due to its specialty in answering question -how‖ and -why‖ question (Merriam, 1998).

Data collection Sample
The students participated in this research were 20 college students from 3 rd year.
They were chosen with purposive sampling technique as they enrolled in writing class in which one of the materials in the syllabus stated was persuasive essay. They were grouped into two, low and high achievers based on the class composition of writing achievement. In addition to that, it was an adjustment to EDI learning concept which distinguishes such a group.

Instruments
Three instruments were employed to collect the data in this present research: observation, document analysis and interview. Observation was employed to mainly answer the research questions. Document analysis was utilized to collect the students' writing data due its availability in online platform. Interview, designed in open-ended, concerned on how the students' responses and acceptance to the implementation of EDI.

Procedure
The primary data were collected from the observation during learning at class. The process of writing was started by asking the students to state their position towards the theme namely the importance of e-learning. The theme inferred that the students might take the positive side. Afterwards, they were asked to state, elaborate, exemplify and illustrate their thesis in a paragraph. They performed writing task in face-to-face class, and submitted the work to the learning platform.
The lecturer provided feedback and suggestions afterwards. Here, the document analysis was performed. The interview was administered to students once the learning process ended. Open ended questionnaire was applied to seek for their views about EDI implementation.

Data Analysis
The data obtained were then analyzed by adapting Creswell's data analysis (2014). It was performed in the following actions: (1) organizing and preparing the data from the three instruments, done by checking the completeness of whole data; (2) reading the data which aimed at getting general senses accordance with the research foci; (3) coding the data from the whole instruments that allowed the researchers to classify data based on the research foci; (4) describing the data, performed by detailing the process of learning and related data; (5) interpreting the data, executed by justifying the data to the existing theory or relevant research; (6) presenting the data based on the research foci; and (7) triangulating the data with the intention of confirming the validity of whole data from the three instruments to see whether or not they supported each other.

Data Validity
The data gained from the observation, interview and document analysis were validated by triangulation. It was regarded crucial to make sure that the data collected were related and supported each other.

Composing Thesis
Earlier in the drafting process, the students showed various understanding of how to write a thesis sentence in showing and stressing their position. The low achiever, instead of taking side of the provided theme, she mentioned the definition of e-learning. The thesis then changed in revising stage, from conveying definition to taking position. Meanwhile, from the beginning, the high achiever had stated her position by declaring e-learning position. She made a little change in her thesis to be denser and focused by mentioning high technologies patronizing learning. The following table details the thesis composition. During the process of composing arguments, the lecturer implemented reteaching and CFU frequently with the companion of T-APPLE concept. This was observed as efforts of convincing and empowering the students with the accurate thesis composition. To Ybarra (2014), such reinforcement is crucial elements in EDI.

Listing and Analyzing Arguments
Coming to the next stage of composing and analyzing arguments, the lower achiever provided one argument about the importance of e-learning from the time point of view. However, in the following clause she mentioned -everywhere‖ signaling place. Moreover, she put less appropriate conjunction -in otherwise‖, whereas she seemed to provide supporting sentences for the previous argument. She then modified the argument: adding the new one and putting them in sequence. The high achiever, likewise in the thesis, had put two arguments.
The same arguments were placed in the revision, and as a variation, she added enumerating connective in the first argument to facilitate easier understanding.
The details can be watched in the table below. During this stage, the lecturer kept implementing guided practice accompanied by re-teaching and CFU with T-APPLE. This aimed at directing the students to list reasonable arguments with similar tone in line with the position they took in the thesis. It is viewed that the students could provide acceptable reasoning in line with the position they took in the thesis. This further signifies that the students' critical thinking has started to come up. This is in line with Bowell and Kemp's idea (2005) acknowledging that critical thinking enables people to propose good reasoning.
Peer teaching was also observed to perform by the high achievers to assist the low achievers. This was considered beneficial for the students; the high achievers could share their knowledge and experience, while the low achievers got meaningful learning experience. This benefit is in line with the findings from Ali, Anwer, and Abbas (2015).

Drawing Conclusion
To conclude the essays, the low achiever earlier only concluded the argument without presenting any persuading words. In the revising process, conclusion transformation took place. The conclusion was simply drawn with the presence of persuasive word -should‖. While drafting, the high achiever summed up her thesis and arguments by stating imperative sentence -Choose e-learning.‖ She reworked her piece by writing a conclusion with a similar tone but in a smoother sentence. In this last stage, the students were similarly illuminated by the implementation of re-teaching and CFU with T-APPLE concept to guarantee they concluded the essays appropriately. This signifies that the students has fulfilled a set of argument which should provide conclusion and reasons (Halpern, 2003).
The process of composing thesis, listing and analyzing arguments, and concluding the essay took place during routine 5 of guided practice. The lecturer implemented guided practice supported by peer teaching performed by the high achievers to give assistance the low achievers. The repetition of teaching or reteaching and the presence of CFU with T-APPLE concept helped out the students to create sound persuasive essays.
In respect of the finding explanation, it is exact that EDI has facilitated the students to work on their writing more appropriately and resulted in well-organized writing. This is to mention that EDI has enhanced the students' ability in constructing, organizing, and analyzing arguments. In other words, argument analysis dimension of critical thinking (Halpern, 2003) has been encouraged. This enhancement is also in line with several research reports (Chuah et al., 2011;El & See, 2019;Liu, 2018;Nguyen, 2016;Wilson, 2016;Zhao, Pandian, Kaur, & Singh, 2016). For the low achievers, EDI significantly directed the writing modification to be more organized, cohesive and coherent. For the high achievers, EDI assisted them with writing refinement. As an emphasis, EDI has enhanced the students' critical thinking with re-teaching and CFU with T-APPLE concept, which is not found in DI or EI (Ybarra, 2014) Further, the reinforcement was admitted by the students to be the most memorable activity. They mentioned that CFU drove them to remember the materials conveyed, including writing them down in their essays. They also appreciated frequent re-teaching and constructive feedback from the lecturer.
These all are the implementation of EDI specific principle (Hollingsworth & Ybarra, 2009). In addition to that, the students felt assisted and became more aware by the presence of writing format used in the routines which coached them to remember what points should be verbalized. This proves what Shea and Whitla (2005) and Emilia (2011) propose that writing format will be an aid for students to simply think critically. Such a format has been also proved to be supplementary support to infuse critical thinking into writing as reported by previous research (Purnawarman, Susilawati, & Sundayana, 2016).

EDI Implementation in Writing Class
During the classroom sessions, the lecturer taught the students by adapting EDI lesson design. The following is the detail learning activities conducted in the classroom.

Learning objectives
The learning objectives mentioned that the students were expected to be able to define and classify essays in general, and write appropriate and acceptable persuasive essays. The lecturer conveyed the learning objective in simple English, accommodating the low achievers to grasp the meaning comprehensively.

CFU
The lecturer asked the students whether or not they caught the short explanation of the learning objectives. Once the students expressed their confusion, she then repeated the explanation. This is one of the proposal of EDI that re-teaching can always be done once it is needed as a form of pace control (Ybarra, 2014).

Routine 2: Activate Prior Knowledge
The part of activating prior knowledge was conducted by conferring questions to the students about technology development. Some students showed their various responses. The higher achievers seemed to be the most enthusiasts in conveying ideas. The notion of up-to-date, modern, cool and millennial was surfacing. To extend, some of them named social networking platform, educational platform, signaling their involvement in the question. In the contrary, the low achievers were visibly doubt to express their argument. Even so, they tried answering the questions after the lecturer stimulated them. This had been predicted earlier that the low achievers would need more guided questions to deliver their answers. Over all, most students responded to question well although with different process of answering.
The second question was about persuasive essays. The lecturer posed 3-5 higher order questions as suggested by Ybarra (2014). The questions given were earnestly about students' writing experience in the previous course; what genre (argumentative) they had learned earlier, the function of the genre, the generic structure of the genre and difficulties they encountered, and the last, the question related to persuasive essays. Such questions were asked as an effort to cognitively recall (Hollingsworth & Ybarra, 2004) their memories from the previous course. The questions seemed to be given carefully and in simple words, sometimes the lecturer utilized code mixing to make sure that all students, especially the low achievers, comprehended the questions well. This strategy agrees Browne and Keeley's opinion (2007) that we should give questions, which lead to no ambiguous interpretation and stimulate critical answers from the people being asked. This is precisely in agreement with EDI's principle as well, to distinguish high and low achievers by using slightly different strategy to meet the demand of learning (Ybarra, 2014).

CFU
CFU in this stage was completed by asking students to repeat their answers to those posed questions but they needed to paraphrase all the answers. Paraphrasing is suggested by Hollingsworth and Ybarra (2004)to verify students' answers in CFU stage. It seemed that some students got hard time, even the high achievers. The lecturer then led them to express their answers by allowing them opened their dictionary application.

Concept Development
In this part, the lecturer explained learning material about essays. The explanation of -what it is‖ consisted of 2: 1) the variety of essay definitions were first described as an introduction, and 2) kinds of essays.
The elucidation of essay social function was presented as the realization of -why it is important‖ concept. For -how it is‖, the illumination of persuasive essay generic structure was presented. The essay generic structures were then brought up to enlighten the students with the organization of the text as a form of procedural knowledge (Hollingsworth & Ybarra, 2004). To continue, the language features of essays were submitted, such as the use of conjunction to signal the generic structure of the essays and kinds of verbs used. During this session, the lecturer also opened possibilities for the students to pose questions once confusion came into their minds.

CFU
Understanding of this routine was checked by requesting the students to restate their answers in sheet of paper. Paraphrasing was still applied here.

Routine 4: Explain Skill Development
As the last part of the stage, the students were enlightened by several models of essay. This modeling and demonstrating part are verily crucial to equip students with writing and reading skills (Allington & Johnson, 2002;Cambourne, 2006;in Emilia, 2011).
When modeling the text, the lecturer practiced -thinking aloud‖ (Hollingsworth & Ybarra, 2009) in which she first read the persuasive text to catch students' attention. Then the students especially from low achiever category were chosen randomly to read the essays.
Once the students finished reading, analysis and investigation of the essay details were performed. The lecturer gave some times to them to read the essays by first supplying them a number of questions to guide them grasping the whole meaning of the text. Difficult vocabulary, social function, generic structure (including the analysis of arguments presented) and language feature identification, as well as detail information should be well-noted.

CFU
CFU was done by allowing students to speak up their answers to the questions and confirmed by the lecturer.

Routine 5: Guided Practice
This was the stage in which the students should create a writing product.
The students, with the guidance from the lecturer, started to compose their own persuasive essays. Beforehand, they were given an essay writing format enabling them to write more systematic. First, assisting the students to determine the thesis and list the arguments, the lecturer guided them to choose word(s) in form of phrasal verbs to stress their position towards the topic. Second, the students ought to write down sentences with similar tones signaling their agreement to the topic; to continue, they should list reasonable and relevant arguments. Third, they could use their smartphones to research data and facts supporting their arguments. This process is claimed as a part of providing reasonable reasoning (Allen, 2004). The lecturer kept telling them not to do copy and paste from the internet. Having obtained supporting data and facts, they started drafting their ideas. Ensuring the grasp of the guidance, the lecturer walked rounding the class to provide students with assistance once they encountered difficulties. Fourth, they revised the writing in accordance to the lecturer's suggestion. Fifth, they published the essays by sharing the writing with the lecturer, which adapting the model of publishing from Laksmi (2006) as cited by Kamal and Faraj (2015).

CFU
The lecturer checked each student's work by rounding the class. Peer teaching seemed to be implemented in this stage.

Routine 6: Formative Assessment
The students were given homework to write a persuasive essay about elearning in language learning. The task not was not paper-based; they should performed the task in a learning platform. The lecturer affirmed that this was kind of digital writing (DeVoss, Aadhl, & Hicks, 2010) education for the students. Again, it is visible that another strategy applied in EDI lesson as the principle says that EDI lesson may execute a variety of strategies for the sake of learning objective attainment (Hollingsworth & Ybarra, 2009).

Routine 7: Closure
The students submitted their works to the platform checked by the lecturer. She then verified the task by giving feedback to students' writing and discussed what problems the students encountered during writing the essays. The verification was enforced and the feedback was given based on the concept of -what it is, -why it is‖ and -how it is‖, in conjunction with writing assessment itself.

CONCLUSION AND SUGGESTION
Critical thinking plays critical roles in writing. To that end, the enhancement of it should be taken into consideration. The present research finds out that first, EDI implementation has assisted the students with the development of their critical thinking in argument analysis specifically by the reinforcement provided by reteaching and CFU with T-APPLE concept. Even low achievers can follow the learning and show progress on their achievement seen from writing organization and mechanics. Second, EDI in writing class is implemented in accordance with EDI lesson design in conjunction with a variety of learning strategies indicating EDI flexibility in classroom learning. To these extents, EDI implementation in writing class has specifically enlighten one of critical writing dimensions. Research on EDI effectiveness quantitatively is adjured.